


Le mode de l'homme

by GwenChan



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Blanket Permission, French History, French literature, Gen, Historical Inaccuracy, Historical References, Podfic Welcome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 07:20:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28809510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GwenChan/pseuds/GwenChan
Summary: France visits an old friend. It gets him a change of perspective and maybe a little reality check.
Relationships: France (Hetalia) & Victor Hugo
Comments: 7
Kudos: 11
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	Le mode de l'homme

**Author's Note:**

  * For [yuuago](https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuuago/gifts).



The Atlantic wind under a rain-heavy sky ruffled France’s hair as he walked down the street with a book under his arm, his hands fisted in the pockets of his coat, and a note with an address buried deep among other trinkets of various nature, mostly forgotten.

He walked fast, paying little mind to his surroundings, only nodding from time to time to this and that person, each one of them speaking with the hybrid dialect that is always born when different cultures clash. 

Hearing the thick accent when asking confirmation for the address, his lips pursed in a grimace the locals must surely have interpreted as arrogance and in part was. 

Monsieur Hugo was sitting just outside the front door, on his house porch, so old and different from the young, enthusiastic man he met almost thirty years before, if calendars were to be trusted. 

"I finished your book," France announced, loud and clear, as soon as he came into view. Comfortable in his chair, unfocused eyes gazing towards the horizon, Monsieur Hugo slowly adjusted his position and lifted his head. He turned toward France in a silent question.

"Which one?" he inquired eventually. He paused and his eyes squinted in vague recognition. "You look familiar. Do I know you?"

He twisted the end of his grayish beard as if the gesture could help him remember, giving a name to a face he had already met. France could read it all in the man's eyes; but he didn’t expect, or hope, that Victor Hugo would recognize him right on the spot. Or at all. Human minds didn’t go well together when faced with immortality, and on the outside, France hadn’t aged a day from the man who helped Hugo draft his first  _ Notre Dame.  _

It only made the recognition harder

Hugo had squeezed France dry for details he had mostly forgotten after having deemed them too unpleasant to bother. For days, questions had piled over other questions. They had walked the street of Paris to reconstruct from a single stone whole palaces long destroyed, and with them their stories. It was a different time and a different city, one France had been glad to bury and destroy. Monsieur Hugo, however, had been of different opinion.

When someone had excavated those two skeletons locked together in an eternal embrace, France didn't imagine eventually a novelist would come to him to ask if he remembered anything about the case. There had never been much of a case, actually, but still France had tried to answer, shivering inside as he remembered his own stupidity.

_ I was young _ , he had said.  _ We were all young. _ They were young and with horizons stopping where Portuguese lands touched the Ocean. They were young and stupid and filled with glory.

"Francis Bonnefoy, at your service. Your—" France began crafting the usual excuse, but Monsieur Hugo stopped him mid-way. 

"Francis," he said. "Of course. It's been a while. Aren't thirty years a bit excessive to finish a novel?"

France chuckled sheepishly. He stepped onto the porch and sat on a free chair. "Time is different for our kinds," he said in a dismissive tone. “And you must agree the past decades have been quite eventful. Just recently I had to help a little cousin of mine to win his independence.”

Reading hadn’t exactly been his priority on the occasions when he could find the time and energy to focus in the few years during which he shifted from being a kingdom to a republic to a sort-of empire. It was enough to give anyone a headache.

"Well," Hugo broke into his thoughts, "Then, I'd be more interested in knowing your opinion. Was it how I described?"

"You certainly have reminded me of how ugly things were at the time."

He flipped a page. He had been a teen back then, barely more than a child, and some things were definitely ugly.

They still were, most of the time. One only had to peer under the gilding surface to discover it, to just step outside the palaces and walk all the dirty second roads. France hated to admit it, but they had been horrible for a long time.

He'd rather focus on the positive: the shining palaces, the parades, the days of glory. 

"And your romance got too lost amidst the pages,” he continued, a hint of admonishment in his voice.

"Romance was never the focus," Monsieur Hugo countered. France let out a deliberately dramatic sigh. 

"What a pity. I still believe people would be more interested in a romance than in a treaty about architecture.”

But a treaty about architecture and a declaration of love to Our Lady had been what Victor wanted to write and what he wrote. 

Some new papers piled amidst the cups and glasses, a pen placed atop them to stop them from flying away in the wind. France indulged in curiosity 

"Working on another novel?" He inquired, peering at the papers. He made to take one before even asking permission. 

"Yes. About the Revolution of 1832," Monsieur Hugo provided. "Which must still be fresh in your mind, I suppose."

“It is,” France confirmed, already sensing where the conversation was going to end. He was sure he liked it. He let out a long sigh, veiled with unusual sarcasm. “Charming times.” 

In a certain sense, they had been, at least from him. If he looked from specific lenses, tilting his head till having the right perspective. Under another, he could only see the wounds and all that made him bleed. 

  
  


“It is still a draft,” Monsieur Hugo continued, with the reservations every writer held for their work. He paused, then blinked as if he had just remembered something. “But I trust you will find all details already impeccable.”

“Then reading it will be a pleasure.”

Francis scanned the page, navigating Victor’s handwriting, the abrupt changes of mind, the editing, and the comments with practiced ease. Later, he would read them again with calm and proper attention. Now, images weaved into words jumped to the eye, so much he couldn’t say if they were memories of imagination. 

  
  


He remembered people throwing whatever they had from the windows, some who had nothing but chairs and other furniture to pile against the tyranny yet still fought. 

Somebody, a boy, little more than a child, had grabbed him by the sleeve of his fancy jacket and pleaded to join them, like he did with their fathers and grandfathers. Other nations had looked at him like he was crazy, a madman, an illness to eliminate.

_ This is your place _ , the boy had said with eyes and gestures. Y _ ou fought with us already. What happened to that man? _

He had been cured. This, he thought. Cured. It’s what others, nations and humans, said: cured from a period of madness, cured from thinking he could do without a king. What absurdity.

But the madness had already spread.

Francis had liked the Republic, had liked finally being governed by those same people of whom he was a living incarnation. He had liked the Empire too. Drunk on power and glory, with the whole of Europe fitting into his palm.

Then everything had crumbled, things back as if the last century never happened. But they had happened, only a few years before, and people remembered it all. It had been only forty years before, almost nothing from his point of view; only yesterday. 

It still felt like yesterday.

"They were my children.”

When France spoke, it was a little more than a whisper, more of a self-reflection than a piece of information to share. 

“Is that so?” Victor leaned forward, and France didn’t miss how he had shot for the pen, grimacing at the lack of ink. The problem got fixed quickly. “And how many?” he asked, now with a fresh paper before him and his pen shining black.

“All of them. They were all my children.” France laughed without a trace of joy. 

Monsieur Hugo scoffed. “All of them? I’ve heard about your  _ fame,  _ Monsieur France, but I have to admit my surprise.”

“You aren’t exactly one who can chide, monsieur.” This time France couldn’t hold his tongue. He might have a certain reputation, but Hugo was no different.

He was writing, still. France let out another small laugh. “I have thousands of children. All French people, they are my children. Both the people fighting in the streets and the police sent to repress them.”

They were his children, his own blood and flesh, and he had had to watch one group kill the other. All while he was in some palace room filling papers of which he had long forgotten usage and contents, a couple guards at the door ‘for his own safety.’   
  


_ So that he wouldn’t do anything rash.  _

Like a couple of simple human guards could actually stop a nation like him, had he decided against it. 

“But I didn’t do anything.”

Like he hadn’t answered that child’s call, and when King Louis Philippe had sent someone to summon him, he had gone, like the bitch many said he was. The nation who helped America break free from England and then took inspiration to fight his own way to liberty, who had ruled half Europe, now was back at square one. 

“That is right. You did not do anything,” Monsieur Hugo said, reprimand in every word, a strict and tired father chastising a capricious child. If France thought to find understanding and compassion, he was mistaken, clashing against the truth like a cold shower. Somehow, it was exactly what he needed

“My kind obeys the authority,” he tried, a justification that felt empty as soon as it was said. Hugo, rightfully, showed no pity.

“You speak like a coward. The people you said you represent are the only authority to which you should answer. You should stop trying to find an excuse.”

Lack of freedom. It could work a couple centuries ago, when he was little more than a child and the idea people could rise against the anointed king and the power bestowed by God. He represented the people, and the people didn’t ask questions; they only bowed their heads and accepted the rules.

Then new ideas came, a light in the dark. Even if he wished so, things couldn’t return the way they once were.

The man he was before was dead and buried. He had been lynched, beheaded, and then took a bullet in the heart at Waterloo. He was dead and the old ways died with him.

“I wish things would be that easy,” he attempted, voice wilting under Hugo’s stern gaze.

“Life is not easy, Monsieur France. Life is hard, hard for the majority of the people, if you happen to have forgotten. In this case, you are the one who has it easy.”

“I wouldn’t—”

“And,” Hugo interrupted him like a stern father who wasn’t done scolding his offspring, “the authority of which you speak should be the one of the people, those whose flesh, blood, mind, and soul allow you to exist. I believe you are the child of them.”

“A child of the people.” Francis hid a little chuckle behind his hand. “It is an interesting view.”

Under a certain light, Victor Hugo wasn’t wrong. His people, the fact they all considered themselves French, that they shared a language and a culture, all of it was what made him ‘France.’ Once, almost a thousand years ago, that feeling had been strong enough to give him life. He knew the woman he called mother hadn’t sired him by her flesh. 

“I had been a child once,” he murmured, a little surprised, like it was a novelty more for him than for Hugo. There had been a time when he, too, was a baby nation, a joyous toddler living under Gaul’s watch, a child of all the village.

Time passed quickly for a nation. Before he could blink, Gaul had become a province under a foreign power, and soon after, she had died. Meanwhile, the village had become a town; new people had taken him under their wings. He remembered a monastery first, old men trying to inculcate in him a new faith and a new behavior, and a castle after that. Someone of his kind, a proud warrior clad in a shining armor, lived there. For the growing kid, he had been almost a father. He had guided him toward glory.

By the time the Kingdom of Frank had died too, France hadn’t been a child in centuries.

“I believe you still are,” Hugo said. For a moment, France had a feeling he heard his memories, but no, he hadn’t spoken, and the little journey down memory lane had been his and only his.

“Maybe you are right. And maybe I still need a father. Not a king, or a president, or a general.”

A man who wouldn’t care about power, someone with taste and immense knowledge whose wisdom could help a nation navigate the troubled waters of childhood and adolescence to the safe shore of adulthood. Hugo might have been one of his children once, but now, sitting on the porch before him, it was hard to not see a father in him.

Something clenched around his heart, quick, cold, and somehow viscid as a shiver ran down his spine despite the warm evening air. It was the flash of a thought, a fast reminder. Victor Hugo would die too, like many before him, and it would all happen before France could notice. He’d better not get attached. 

But love in all its forms ran in his veins. He couldn’t help it. 

“Yes,” Hugo interlaced fingers under his chin, “as a nation, you need guidance. But not from a father or even a mentor.” He spoke as if he had just read his mind. “You don’t need a single figure whom to attach. You need to grow, take your responsibilities and listen to your own nation.”

“Strict as always,” France sighed. “But just.”

He had helped two fellow nations along the paths to their own independence, experienced more than a revolution, and changed too many forms of government in a time that, as a nation, had felt all too quick. Maybe it was enough to grow.

“Of course, you know my address. It will always be my pleasure to provide advice and guidance. Reading that again,” Hugo pointed at the book France had left forgotten onto the table, “could be a great place to start.”

“And what about that?” France replied, nodding at the pile of handwritten papers. 

“When it’s finished, it will be another great lesson,” Hugo said.”

“Then I’ll read it with pleasure.”

“Will it take you another thirty years?”

He spoke with no trace of humor, but France couldn’t help but laugh a little. “I will try to be faster. I’d— I’d like to speak about it with you once more.”

Looking at Hugo, he’d done the easy math before he could stop himself and the cold from spreading in his chest. He chased it away. This time, he’d be a more disciplined and faster reader.

It was getting late.

“I think it’s time for me to take my leave,” France began his farewell, a good guest who didn’t wish to overstay his welcome. 

Victor Hugo nodded. “It has been nice talking with you, Monsieur France. We’d be happy to have you as a guest again. Meanwhile, I will be waiting for your letter.”

The last part he said not as a request, but a suggestion that sounded a little like an order.

“It will be a pleasure.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I had great plans for this story, but then 2020 happened. I tried to do some research to at least pretend some level of accuracy but maybe it's better to read it with a closed eye. Apologies for all French people who happened to read.
> 
> The title is from a Hugo quote "Le progrès est le mode de l'homme" (Progress is the manner of man).


End file.
